Twitter #sfbookclub 02 – Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

The polls have closed, and we now have a winner for the second Twitter #sfbookclub!

We’ll be reading Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, winner of the 2006 Hugo Award for best novel. Here’s the blurb.

One night when he was 10, Tyler stood in his backyard and watched the stars go out. They flared into brilliance, then disappeared, replaced by an empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The “sun” is now a featureless disk – a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. The world’s artificial satellites have fallen out of orbit. Eventually, space probes reveal that the barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time passes faster outside the barrier – more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death of the sun is only about forty years away.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who’s forged a religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines, then humans, to Mars…and immediately an emissary returns with thousands of stories about the settling of Mars. Then an identical barrier appears around Mars.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

This isn’t really my genre, but I have to admit the book sounds very cool! I’m excited.

The book is readily available from Amazon, Audible, and through the Kindle Store.

You’ve got until Friday June 26 to read the book, at which point we’ll discuss the book on Twitter using the hashtag #sfbookclub. The discussion is open-ended in theory, but in practice will probably run through the weekend, wrapping up on Monday, June 29. This will give everyone a chance to participate whether they tend to tweet from work or home.

See the official #sfbookclub page for more details.